


oh guard the pounding sound

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Justice League of America's Vibe (Comics), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Autistic Character, Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Dysfunctional Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Protectiveness, Trans Female Character, Transphobia, platonic relationship exploration, worldbuilding of a kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 12:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14520795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: From the moment she is born, Cynthia is Quell’s entire world.A story about a king and a princess in the shadow of a queen.





	oh guard the pounding sound

**Author's Note:**

> All warnings are in the tags but I'll reiterate them here-Lady Mordeth abuses her husband and Cindy both emotionally and physically, which is brought up to an extent. It's not gone into graphic detail but the canonical rape Cindy survived is implied to happen when she runs away. Cindy is also a trans girl, which her mother doesn't approve of at all, hence the warning for transphobia.
> 
> Anyway this is kinda cope-y but also kinda character study-like. Quell and Cindy's relationship is weird and I love it a lot.

From the moment she is born, Cynthia is Quell’s entire world.

To him, she’s perfect. For the first seven years of her life, things are good. His wife is pleased with them both, which is a new development, and surprisingly enough with Cynthia especially. She’s introduced to the world as the crown prince, tiny features projected onto televisions all over the world. He goes back and watches the footage sometimes. Sees how his wife’s fingers curl protectively around Cynthia’s shoulder. How uncomfortable she looks in her tiny prince outfit.

Of course, he is the first one that she tells.

She’s seven and tiny and blinking up at him with big brown eyes and asking if they can do something secret. They play secret games together a lot. So that they don’t bother the queen while she’s doing whatever important work she has that day. He tells her that they can play whatever game she wants them to play.

Cynthia tells him, shyly, that she wants to play the nickname game again. Where they pretend she’s grown up to be just like him so she needs a special secret name. Usually the special secret name is something silly. Once, Quell recalls, it was ‘Hogarth’.

This time, the first name that she suggests he call her by is _Annie._ He stops and looks at her tiny shuffling feet and fisted hands and hopeful eyes and says, “You’re no Annie. What about Artemis? Still starts with an A.”

Seemingly delighted that he understands the unspoken rules of this new game, she beams and says that she doesn’t like Artemis she was just telling him what kind of name she wanted, and they sit on the floor for an hour coming up with them. She’s fond of the name Petal, which is information that Quell stores away, but decides, in the end, that she likes Cynthia the best. It means the same as Artemis, but without the A at the front.

Later, she tugs on his sleeve and says solemnly that the game is going to keep going. She’s going to play the being-a-girl game. Except it’s not really a game. The being-a-boy was the pretending game. He tells her that she can be a girl if she wants to be for as long as she likes, but that maybe they should hide it from her mother for a little while longer. Just to keep her safe. The last thing Quell wants his for Cynthia’s idea of them, that they’re a perfect royal family, to be shattered by her mother. And he knows she _will_ shatter it.

When the blow up finally happens, it’s loud and ugly and someone is ordered to cut all of Cynthia’s hair off, which leaves her unable to speak or even really move for days on end. She does that sometimes.

Quell knows his girl is weird. She was quick to crawl and walk but slow to sit up and talk and she doesn’t look anyone in the eyes even when they try to force her to and she can’t eat certain foods and she can’t wear certain things and sometimes she can’t talk and she likes to flap her arms when she gets excited and she just can’t _do_ a lot of things. She’s weird. But she’s his.

His and _only_ his.

The queen can be as bitter as she likes. Cynthia takes after him in looks and actions and in almost everything. And she clearly prefers him to her mother, or at least she does now. Good. The queen has changed. He’d loved her once, when he was younger, or at least he _thinks_ he might have, but now he’s only still around because he can’t take Cynthia from her. He knows how she’ll be treated the second he leaves and even though it hurts _him_ to stay, too, it’ll be so much worse for her. So he bears it. He has to. For his baby girl.

Until Quell can’t take it anymore. Cynthia’s thirteen when he leaves for the second time (the first was before Cynthia was born, before he knew the queen was pregnant with a kid that was _his),_ sick of his wife constantly being so deeply inside of his head he can’t tell which thoughts are his and which are things she’s implanted in there. He leaves and it would be nice to say that he doesn’t look back, but he does. Constantly. For his little petal.

Which is how he knows that three months after he leaves, on her fourteenth birthday, she leaves too. She runs away for five months. Quell doesn’t track her. He could. He really could. Later, he regrets that he doesn’t.

He comes back the same day she does, when his wife, so furious it burns his skin, tells him that Cynthia is home and that she is still insisting that she’s a _she_ and that she keeps begging for him, screaming and crying and throwing fits. Quell knows how much it hurts her to have to ask him for help after everything she’s done to him, but he also knows that she knows he can’t say no when it comes to his daughter.

So he comes back, to a furious wife and a traumatized little girl who can’t leave her room. The first time he sees her, he almost throws up, and he has to break some things before he’s able to see her again. He doesn’t ask which bruises came from what happened to her and which came from her mother. He can tell from which ones are older, anyway.

She curls up into his side, burrowing into his ribs and sobbing out that she missed him but things got so bad that she had to leave because she was afraid that she’d die and then they got bad when she ran away and then she had to come back because-because-because-

Quell rubs her shoulder, shaking with anger while Cynthia whispers out a story of running and hiding and trying not to get found by her mother or the police or _anybody_ until someone picked her up outside of Piradell and promised to drive her to its neighboring city and then-and then _hurt her_ and-

He promises that he’ll find him and kill him for her. To keep her safe. He’ll even let her join in, if that’s what she wants. Anything for his petal. Cynthia sobs out that she doesn’t want him to go yet because there’s something else that she has to tell him, and then she looks up at him with her eyes bleeding bright red.

For a moment he worries it’s blood, and then he sees the glow in her veins and he _grins._ The queen wanted their daughter to be just like her. Cynthia’s never going to be. This proves it. She’s _his_ kid through and through.

“It-it happened after he was-after he was finished,” she whispers, squeezing her knees together and hugging her shoulders. She rocks back and forth a little bit with the heavy weighted blanket he wrapped around her shoulders clutched close. “I don’t… I don’t know-it’s like you, right? Not like-not like Mom?”

“Not like her,” Quell agrees, gently cupping her chin in his hands. He kisses her forehead. “Like me. Okay? You’re like me, not like her.”

Cynthia relaxes a little bit, burying her face in his chest. “Good. I don’t wanna be like her. I wanna be like you.”

“I think I know of a way for me to get you out of here, okay?” Quell says softly. “Just hang on a little longer, Petal. Just a little longer and I can get you out.”

He’s not sure if he can. But if he can’t do it the way he wants, he’ll take her somewhere else. Raise her on another world, away from her mother and her mother’s pets, away from all of this hurting and pain and people who want her to pretend to be something that she’s not.

He tells his wife that he’s going to take Cynthia to train to be a Collector. Like him. It’ll be good publicity for her and for the program itself. To have the crown princess herself training to protect their world. Their daughter has powers-not the ones his wife was so desperately hoping that she would have, the ones she conceived her to have, but _his_ powers.

She doesn’t resist, or at least not as much as she could’ve. She knows it’ll reflect well on her to have Cynthia as a Collector.  And she also knows that it means their daughter will be free of her, at least for awhile. And that this way Cynthia will have a handle on her powers. Won’t accidentally destroy that death machine she thinks she has hidden from Quell underneath the Spire.

He takes Cynthia away the next morning. This isn’t exactly a safe job for her, and he knows there’s a chance he’ll end up outliving her even if she commits to it, but at least it’s better than the fate waiting for her if she stayed at the Spire. The queen needs Cynthia alive, but she has a habit of breaking even the toys that she needs intact.

He refuses to make the same mistakes that he made before. He’ll never let Cynthia get hurt by someone he wasn’t there to stop ever again. He can’t.

She’s his whole world.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @danteramon on tumblr if you wanna say hi.


End file.
